It was inevitable.
Antonio Villaraigosa's victory in the Los Angeles mayor's race may not have been certain until the end, but no one has doubted in recent years that Los Angeles would one day have a Latino mayor. Recent history -- and changing demographics -- guaranteed it.
Villaraigosa's victory was the culmination of years of effort by Latinos seeking to play a role in the political life of a city becoming ever more Hispanic.
The election of a Latino mayor is perhaps the strongest sign yet of the integration of Latinos into the mainstream of political life in California, a development that has been building steadily, if unevenly, for three decades. And the trend has probably not crested yet.
There are now hundreds of Latino elected officials throughout California, including Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles), Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, Los Angeles school board President Jose Huizar, seven members of Congress, 10 state senators, 19 state assembly members and dozens of county supervisors, council members, water board members and judges. "It's becoming normalized in our political imagination that we can have a Latino speaker [of the Assembly], a Latino mayor, maybe a Latino governor without burdening the person with that label," said Gregory Rodriguez, a Los Angeles political analyst and senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
That normalization of Latinos in politics came slowly.
One of its trailblazers was Gloria Molina, who in 1991 became the first Latina elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. She won in a reconfigured district after a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that the previously all-white board had violated the federal Voting Rights Act by drawing supervisorial district boundaries in a manner that unfairly diluted the voting power of Latinos.
Four years earlier, Molina had become only the third Latino elected to the Los Angeles City Council in the 20th century. Her victory came after the city settled a lawsuit filed by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Justice Department by agreeing to reconfigure the boundaries of City Council districts so that Latino voting strength wasn't diluted. By the 2001 municipal election, there were three Latinos on the City Council; a fourth was elected that year.
